1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to tools and techniques for designing Service Oriented Architecture systems (SOAs) and more particularly to tools and techniques for implementing rules in SOAs that are being designed or modified in their design.
2. Description of the Related Art
SOAs are known. various components of SOAs are known, such as: user interface (UI), rules engines, process flow engine, database system, reporting system, application servers, etc.
Tools for designing SOAs are known. One such tool is called SOMA-ME (Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture-Modeling Environment) which was created by IBM to help designers design SOAs. It is known that SOAs make heavy use of “SOA operational rules” in their operation. One choice that an SOA designer will routinely make is the choice of which tool or platform (herein collectively called “tool/platform”) that will be used to implement a given SOA operational rule that is to be included in an SOA. The decision of which tool/platform to use to implement a given SOA operational rule will herein be referred to as the “tool/platform decision.” It is known that when the tool/platform decision is made in an inappropriate way, this can cause problems in one or more of the following areas: maintenance, service performance and/or solution performance.